Accessibility
In broad terms, accessibility is the ability for a user to access and use information and technology even if this user operates in constrained conditions. Information and technology can be accessible through appropriate specialized technical interfaces. The present invention is directed to a technology to enable visually impaired and blind people to access information printed on physical documents.
Many groups, in governments, private industries and universities, are working on ways to guarantee universal access to the on-line world for all individuals in society. This social movement, combined with a strong push to provide a better accessibility in the workplace, drives an urgent call for new technologies.
As information technology (IT) penetrates all commercial and public transactions and communications, it is important to ensure accessibility to everyone. Governments have begun to define new regulations and standards to enable people with disabilities to easily access information technology. For instance, in the US, the federal, state and local governments have initiated a legislation requiring computer technology to be accessible to people with disabilities. More particularly, in June 2001, the U.S. Federal Government has implemented a legislation known as “Section 508”. Section 508 has changed the rules of the game on how the government must buy information technology and in particular “accessible” IT.
Countries have established regulations that require accessibility at some level, other countries are in the process of developing such regulations. In addition, international organizations are working to develop accessibility standards.
Accessibility Aids for Blind People
For someone who is completely unable to use a normal screen or read a printed text, there are two alternatives: Braille reading or speech. Currently available assistance for blind and visually impaired people comprises a wide range of technical solutions, including document scanners and enlargers, interactive speech software and cognitive tools, screen reader software and screen enlargement programs.                Screen Readers: This technology converts text (or other elements) on a computer screen to speech, allowing blind or visually impaired users to hear what is displayed on their computer screen. For example, “Jaws for Windows” is a computer screen-reader application from Henter-Joyce. It operates with Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98 and Windows 95 and includes an enhanced software speech synthesizer for speaking in several languages.                    Note: Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation, a company with corporate headquarters in Redmond, Wash., USA.                        Web Page Readers: This technology reads aloud text just as it appears on Web pages. For example, “Home Page Reader” of IBM, understands HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the programming language used to design Web pages. Home Page Reader can accurately read text comprised in tables, or included in graphic descriptions, so that blind users can easily navigate on the Web.                    Note: IBM is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation, a company with corporate headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., USA.                        Mail Readers: This technology uses a screen reader for converting the text of an e-mail to speech. For example, “Lotus Notes Release 5” of IBM, enables blind users to check the status of their e-mail (unread, read, deleted), to use calendar functions, and to file and organize documents.        Braille Editing Systems (BES): These systems allow users to input Braille characters from the keyboard. For instance, IBM provides a BES that can be downloaded from the IBM Web.        Scanning Reading Systems: The information printed on a physical document is first scanned. Then, using an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technique and a speech synthesizer, this information can be read to blind people. For example, “Open Book: Ruby Edition 4.0” of IBM is a program that transforms a computer, a sound card, and a scanner into a reading machine for reading books, magazines, memos, bills, and many other printed documents.        Screen Magnifiers: These software tools allow a visually impaired user to magnify text and images on a computer screen. For example, “MAGic Screen Magnification”, from Henter-Joyce, is a screen magnification product for Windows.        Portable document magnifiers: The MAXPort by NanoPac, Inc. is a portable magnifying system. The user wears a special pair of glasses, points at a particular part of a physical document and can see a magnified image of said particular part.Access to Printed Material        
Reading manuals and reports at work, textbooks at school, and menus at restaurants, and more generally reading printed material at any time and in any place is part of daily life. The present invention is based on the following observation: it is easier and quicker for sighted people to turn over pages of a book than to browse electronic pages on a computer screen. It would be an improvement to provide a similar capability to blind and visually impaired people. For instance, it would be a real improvement for blind people to have the possibility to access information printed on a physical document directly from this physical document.
When we compare paper based information with computer based information, paper has a number of useful properties that computers cannot provide. For instance:                paper is portable, familiar and can be easily distributed;        paper is easy to read, mark, and manipulate.        
Many electronic systems attempt to replace paper. They offer, for instance, a better access to multimedia services. However, most users prefer to work with paper and it is difficult to foresee, in a near future, a general and massive replacement of paper books by electronic books (e.g., by Web accessible e-books).
Publication entitled “The Last Book”, IBM Systems Journal, Vol 36, No. 3-1997, by J. Jacobson, B. Comiskey, C. Turner, J. Albert, and P. Tsao of the MIT Media Laboratory, compares printed books and computer screens in the following terms:                “A book represents a fundamentally different entity than a computer screen in that it is a physical embodiment of a large number of simultaneous high-resolution displays. When we turn the page, we do not lose the previous page. Through evolution the brain has developed a highly sophisticated spatial map. Persons familiar with a manual or textbook can find information that they are seeking with high specificity, as evidenced by their ability to remember whether something that was seen only briefly was on the right side or left side of a page, for instance. Furthermore their haptic connection with the brain's spatial map comprises a highly natural and effective interface, when such information is embodied on actual multiple physical pages.        Another aspect of embodying information on multiple, simultaneous pages is that of serendipity and comparison. We may leaf through a large volume of text and graphics, inserting a finger bookmark into those areas of greatest interest. Similarly, we may assemble a large body of similar matter in order to view elements in contrast to one another, such as might be done to determine which of a particular set of graphical designs is most satisfying”.        
Publication entitled “A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents”, O'Hara and Sellen, XRCE: Technical Report: EPC-1997-101, Xerox Co. summarizes a study comparing reading from paper to reading on-line. As reported in this article:                “Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing”.        
As reported in an article entitled “Paper is still with us”, by Ph. Jane Benson—The Journal of Electronic Publishing, published by the University of Michigan Press—                “Studies of professionals at work underscore three points that are critical to the design of scientific information: paper isn't going away, reading and writing are inextricably intertwined, and readers sample and navigate text according to specific purposes and tasks”.        
Also, in the article entitled “Electronic Journals: What do users think of them ?”, by Dr Cliff McKnight, Department of Information and Library Studies, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicester LE11 3TU, UK, we can read:                “A paper journal article is more easily manipulated than an electronic version. As one student subject in the Cafe Jus study remarked: ‘It is easier to turn the page of a paper journal’. More than just page-turning, though, regular journal readers understand the structure of journal articles and use that knowledge to aid manipulation, providing rapid access to the information in an article. For example, Dillon showed that people could reconstruct articles from a set of paragraphs with about 80% accuracy. They also displayed a similar level of accuracy in saying which section of an article isolated sentences had been taken from. Watching a reader pick up an issue of a journal, skim through the contents, turn to an article and skim through it and then turn back to the contents, all in a matter of seconds, it is clear that such skills are largely automatic. Watching people trying to do the same thing in an electronic journal system, it is clear that people will have to learn a different set of skills”.        
Sighted people can browse very easily through paper catalogs, magazines, newspapers, maps and books by flipping through the pages and by “glancing” at pictures and text. It is also very easy for them to mark and return to specific parts of a physical document. It would be desirable to offer similar possibilities to blind and visually impaired people and in particular to enable these people to easily browse through the same paper catalogs, magazines, newspapers, maps and books, and to easily “access” (receive and hear) information related to pictures and text printed on pages of these documents.
The convenience and usefulness of a system for enabling blind and visually impaired people to access information directly from hard-copy documents, to turn over pages and to manually search for text, is well illustrated by in the following article entitled “Talking Books Speak Volumes”, by Kendra Mayfield, Wired News, Jul. 13, 2000,                “When George Kerscher began to lose his sight in his late twenties, the former teacher realized that he might never be able to read the same way again. Since he could no longer delve through the written page Kerscher, who has the degenerative disease retinitis pigmentosa, began listening to audio books. But while these cassettes helped him read, they were limited. He couldn't turn pages or search for text. He had to endure hours of recordings to find the information he needed”.        
In fact audio tapes have a drawback which is similar to the drawback experienced when we scroll computer screens: the user can only go forward or backwards. The possibilities of navigation are very limited. It is difficult for people with visual impairments, to use audio books or screen readers the same way sighted people do. For instance, looking up a recipe or searching for a gardening tip on an audio tape or on a long electronic book is extremely tedious and time consuming.
Nowadays, digital audio books are designed to make published documents accessible and navigable for to blind or visually impaired persons. The ANSI/NISO Z39.86 standard, defines a format and content for an electronic file set that comprises a digital audio book and establishes a limited set of requirements for digital audio books playback devices. It uses established and new specifications to delineate the structure of digital audio books whose content can range from text with corresponding spoken audio, to audio with little or no text. However, if a sighted user of a physical book wishes to discuss a particular section of such this book with a blind user, the blind user must actively search for a digital copy of the same edition of the book and then must search for the relevant section. There is a need to enable individuals familiar with paper documents to continue to use those same documents as they age and their vision may be deteriorating. There is also a need to provide a mechanism by which the text of a familiar physical document may be supplemented by speech output or display of a more easily readable version of the text.
One of the characteristics of the publishing industry is that most publications can be delivered in a digital form. In some cases, the digital form has really supplanted the physical one. In other cases, the digital form appears complementary to the physical one. However, in most cases, the physical form is till dominant. In fact, in terms of business models, with the exception of journals and directories, which tend to follow a subscription model, most publishers have been unable to create profitable digital products and services, able to generate significant incomes. Digital audio books represent an important improvement compared to traditional analog audio books. For instance, digital audio books provide access to virtually stored information, offer improved navigation capabilities, allow the use of keywords for searching and directly accessing text in electronic books. However, due to a relatively limited number of vision impaired users, the cost of such digital audio books remains relatively high. It results from this that a very small number of titles are published both, as printed books and as digital audio books.
The necessity of using a natural friendly interface for having access to information has been precisely summarized by Ann Light, in the article entitled “Fourteen Users in Search of a Newspaper: the Effect of Expectation on Online Behaviour”, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, CSRP507,
“People expect the friendly familiar paradigm of media to guide them through uncharted territories of information”.
According to prior art, electronic reading machines using computer-based optical character recognition (OCR) are widely used to help visually impaired people and people with reading difficulties to read information on paper documents. An electronic reading machine basically comprises                a personal computer connected to a scanner and operating with an OCR software, and        text-to-speech hardware and software.        
Usually, a method for electronically reading a printed document comprises the following steps:                placing a page of a text document on a scanner;        digitizing this page for obtaining a pixel bit map of the page;        converting this image to text by means of an OCR program executed in a personal computer, this personal computer being connected to the scanner; and        generating speech from the text by means of a text-to-speech program.        
Currently, reading machines are provided by a variety of companies, including IBM, Telesensory, Arkenstone and Kurzweil Educational Systems. Unfortunately, electronic reading machines suffer from a variety of functional and operational deficiencies that limit their usefulness. For instance:                scanning a page is a mechanical operation. It takes time to move the electro-optical components of the scanner over the page.        it takes time also to transmit the information from the scanner to the computer.        the OCR process for an entire scanned page, takes a lot of time and resources.        only a single page can be scanned at the same time.        OCR is prone to error. Prime Recognition, in an advertisement for the product PrimeOCR, quotes a typical error rate of 2% for conventional OCR algorithms. PrimeOCR itself reports an error rate of 0.4%, or 8 errors in a typical page of 2000 characters.        
As a result, even for an experienced user, it can take more than a minute before an electronic reading machine can read a single scanned page. During of after the reading, errors must be corrected. The process is repeated for every page in the document.
Since scanners are limited in size, another drawback concerning electronic reading machines is the reading of pages with large formats (a newspaper page for instance). Such pages cannot be scanned in one pass but require multiple passes.
Moreover, a complete electronic reading system with a computer, a scanner, and speech hardware and software is bulky and non portable.
It is clear that reading a text on a paper document by means of an electronic reading machine involves complex manipulations and time consuming operations. However, there are other important deficiencies that limit in practice the acceptance and usefulness of electronic reading machines. Basically, the tasks required for using these electronic reading machines are far to be “natural”. Reading physical documents by means of an electronic reading machine, has nothing in common with the automatic “natural” way of reading practiced by sighted people.
A mobile scanning pen comprising an optical character recognition function, can also be used for producing a digital version of a printed document. Wizcom's Quicklink Pen Personal Scanner is an example of such pen. However, scanning printed words using such a pen can be rapidly tedious and laborious. Each line must be individually (and accurately) scanned and a reasonable visual acuity is required. The present invention does not require a good vision, as only two physical markers are required to define the part of the document that must be read.
As a conclusion, it is important to enable blind people to easily and conveniently access information comprised in hard-copy publications that are read everyday by sighted people.